Reading- sedighe Eyvazi
' Reading ' ' ' Introduction ' ' The ability to read in a second language (L2) is considered to be an essential skill for academic students and it represents the primary way for independent language learning (Carrell and Grabe 2002). In addition, arguments for the importance of this skill abound in the amount of reading research conducted in the last few decades, which has greatly refined and enriched our knowledge about the enigmatic nature of reading comprehension. One strong outcome of this research is that it has helped us to better understand why the skill of reading was traditionally considered a passive skill with no place in L2 teaching, and how it has been increasingly recognized as an interactive, constructive and contextualized process with a key role in developing learners’ communicative competence. The purpose of this chapter is, therefore, to trace these changing patterns of reading comprehension in order to position current teaching practices. Approaches to learning and teaching reading Since the history of language learning has had an enormous influence on how reading has been viewed over the past decades, I will accomplish the task of describing trends in learning and teaching reading by placing the ability to read within each of the three approaches to language learning described in Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor (this volume), namely those of the environmentalist, the innatist and the interactionist approaches. Reading within an environmentalist approach ' ' Up to the end of the 1960s the field of language learning was dominated by environmentalist ideas that avoided speculation about the workings of the human mind and concentrated only on observable facts outside the person. Moreover, modeling and practicing the correct structures time after time were paramount (see Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume). Under such an influence, reading was viewed primarily as a passive, perceptual process. Readers were decoders of symbols printed on a page and they translated these symbols into the corresponding word sounds before they could construct the author’s intended meaning from them (Carrell, Devine, and Eskey 1988). Comprehension of printed material was merely comprehension of speech produced by the reader since the ability to comprehend was regarded as an abstract operation that was difficult to grasp. Environmentalist ideas shaped not just the theoretical conceptions of what reading was but also research (Venezky 2002). Yet early reading research focused chiefly on the nature of perception during reading and it became mainly restricted to the relation between stimuli as words and responses as word recognition. Reading within an innatist approach The early view of reading as a passive, perceptual process was first challenged by the 1960s by Chomsky (1957, 1965) with his theory of language and language development which undermined the behaviourists’ models of language learning that prevailed throughout the 1950s. Chomsky’s (1957, 1965) theory of language provided the basis for the innatist theory of language learning (see Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume), which claims that children are born with a predisposition to language acquisition. Thus, together with the advent of the discipline of psycholinguistics which attempted to test Chomsky’s contentions of language and language development, cognitive processes began to gain more attention. By the mid- 1960s reading practitioners were wondering how an innatist position would work in studying the acquisition of reading and a new generation of reading research began to test that idea. This research came mainly from the work carried out in psycholinguistics and in particular from the work of Goodman (1965, 1967) and Smith (1971). Reading within an interactionist approach By the late 1970s researchers were attempting to identify comprehension skills. This significant change, though, grew out of the interactionist approach to language learning (see Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume) and, particularly, from the work carried out essentially in the disciplines of cognitive psychology and sociolinguistics. In the cognitive psychology field, researchers started to conduct studies on basic processes in reading. They analyzed what happened during the reading act and they incorporated notions of how readers represented text in memory. A major development within this field was the emergence of story grammars. A story grammar is a structural account of narrative stories that readers develop, based on acquisition of knowledge about human interactions and repeated exposure to stories. Story grammarians (Rumelhart 1975; Thorndyke 1977; Stein and Glenn 1979) started looking at the organization of narrative episodes and claimed that certain categories appear to be universal in well-formed stories, regardless of the language in which they were written. For instance, the story grammar categories for Stein and Glenn (1979) were: 1) setting, which consists of characters and surroundings; 2) initiating event, which marks a change in the story environment; 3) internal response, which represents the goal; 4) attempt, which is the effort to achieve the goal; 5) consequence, the attainment or non-attainment of the goal, and 6) reaction, which is the outcome of the consequence. This research direction represented an effort to formulate some correspondence between the structure of the story or text and the processing properties involved in the reading process and its effect on understanding (Rumelhart 1975). However, it did not get to the heart of comprehension because, by being so structural (that is, form was considered more important than content) they tended to ignore non-textual factors of the reading act (Pearson and Stephens 1994). The task of considering the non-textual factors involved in the reading process gave rise to the most influential theory of the 1980s: schema theory. Schema theory (Rumelhart 1977, 1980; Anderson and Pearson 1984) arrived on the scene during the latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s to tackle the relationship between the background knowledge that readers bring to the text and text comprehension. A schema theory, in Rumelhart’s words (1980: 34), “is a theory about how knowledge is represented and about how that representation facilitates the use of the knowledge in particular ways.” One of its fundamental tenants is that any given text, whether it be spoken or written, does not carry any meaning in itself. Rather, it provides directions for readers so that they can construct meaning from their own cognitive structure, that is to say, from their own previously acquired knowledge (Anderson and Pearson 1984). On applying this theory to reading, researchers (Grabe 1988; Rosenblatt 1988; Swaffar 1988) found that reading was an interactive ''process, i.e., it was a dynamic interaction between the writer and the reader in which the reader creates meaning from the text by activating his stored knowledge and extending it with the new information supplied by the text (Grabe 1988). This direction in reading research concentrated on the text-reader interaction. Indeed, that appears to be the current direction, with the added dimension of the social context, which came from the work of sociolinguists. '''Teaching reading within a communicative competence framework' Communicative approaches to L2 language teaching have evolved over the past two decades. A strong background influence is associated with the work of Hymes (1971), who was the first to argue that Chomsky’s (1965) competence-performance dichotomy did not include any reference to aspects of language use in social practice. Hymes (1971) was the first to point out that what was needed was a characterization of not just how language is structured internally but also an explanation of language behavior for given communicative goals. Therefore, he proposed the notion of communicative ''competence, ''which included both grammatical competence as well as the rules of language use in social context and the norms of appropriacy. From the 1980s on, various models of communicative competence have given specifications of the different components which should integrate the communicative competence construct in order to make the process of L2 teaching more effective (Canale and Swain 1980; Canale 1983; Savignon 1983; Bachman 1987, 1990; Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell 1995; Alcón 2000; Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume).